One of the most valuable ways I’ve been spending my time in lockdown is a bi-monthly Zoom meeting with fellow translators to discuss our coronavirus-related work conundrums. The first to come up was seemingly innocuous - “I’m struggling to think of anything to post on LinkedIn.” Having mulled it over for several weeks now I have enough thoughts to fill a whole article. No free ideas for posts, I’m afraid, but hopefully a useful perspective on social media writer's block.
First of all, I wondered why this feels like such an urgent priority. More urgent than, say, writing to our top ten current clients to see how they are and how we could help? Or looking for some new ones? Learning a new skill we could offer?
Social pressure is part of it. We look through our feed and see colleagues sharing updates – whether we find them clever, cute, useful, heartfelt or annoying is irrelevant – and we instantly feel that we’re falling behind. (If we could see them doing something else, like emailing their client list, we might feel a bit more anxious about that). To quell our anxiety, we might enlist the service of a professional social media coach who shows us how to write attention-grabbing posts and hectors us to share one, two, or even three a day.
But what for, exactly? Anyone who’s ever ‘liked’ a colleague’s update out of politeness knows that the relative popularity of our posts says little about how much value they provide to others. And if we post out of a sense of obligation, not a burning desire for self-expression, how much value does it provide for us? Then there’s the attention we generate. Did it lead to a business result that couldn’t have been achieved some other, more efficient way?
Attention is a means, not an end, but it’s so easy to get it backwards. There’s no need to feel obliged to keep feeding the culture of endless hustle, as this article describes, because a buzzing social media profile is a symptom of business success, not the cause of it. Instead of worrying about having nothing to say, let's look at it as a way of making a contribution. A bit like social distancing, we're giving ourselves and others the peace and quiet to reassess what actually matters to our business and that of our clients. Then, ideally, we can figure out how to create the kind of value that we and other people do want to talk about.